Should I buy a house that almost flooded?
Discussion
I have found a fantastic family house which ticks all of the boxes, but in the Gloucester floods 2007 the water came up the drive, but not into the house.
The road is known for flooding, but this is the 1st time the water has got that far up. The council are supposed to be re-doing the drains (which were the problem, not river spill) but they have not so far.
Would you buy it? We have been searching for a the right house for 6 months. Obviously due diligence will be done to make sure it has never flooded.
The road is known for flooding, but this is the 1st time the water has got that far up. The council are supposed to be re-doing the drains (which were the problem, not river spill) but they have not so far.
Would you buy it? We have been searching for a the right house for 6 months. Obviously due diligence will be done to make sure it has never flooded.
Engineer1 said:
Yes it is totally useless except in the fact that if your property falls inside an are that they say is a flood risk then irrespective of evidence, the house has a flood risk.
Sorry, but all I can find is a overview map, and the detail is so low you can't see if your property is inside or out of a flood zone.Engineer1 said:
The other thing to check is the flood maps which are on the environment agency site.
Look carefully at them, though. My road is susceptible to flooding, apparently. Assuming the flood water is 200 feet deep! I believe it was a legacy from 1 house getting slightly flooded 6 or 7 years ago from a blocked road drain drain...skilly1 said:
Sorry, but all I can find is a overview map, and the detail is so low you can't see if your property is inside or out of a flood zone.
Google Environment agency flood map, then pick flood map under their main heading in the google results.The map zooms in to 1:50,000 which is not brilliant, but certainly enough to identify whether the house is under the blue bits or not.
eldar said:
Engineer1 said:
The other thing to check is the flood maps which are on the environment agency site.
Look carefully at them, though. My road is susceptible to flooding, apparently. Assuming the flood water is 200 feet deep! I believe it was a legacy from 1 house getting slightly flooded 6 or 7 years ago from a blocked road drain drain...I think of course, be careful, and the home insurance quote is a good idea, but it's worth remembering almost the whole of Gloucestershire was underwater that year, it was a totally unprecedented flood.
I remember working from home, thinking it wasn't actually that wet out there - it just looked like a normal miserable day, and then turning on the news and seeing Cheltenham Spa railway station completely under water, which is about half a mile away. And Bath Road similar too, in the opposite direction. We were totally unaffected in our street, but locally, places that have never known floods at all (and probably never will again for the foreseeable), had problems.
If you're prepared to accept that once in 100 years, you might get flooded, I wouldn't let it worry you too much.
I remember working from home, thinking it wasn't actually that wet out there - it just looked like a normal miserable day, and then turning on the news and seeing Cheltenham Spa railway station completely under water, which is about half a mile away. And Bath Road similar too, in the opposite direction. We were totally unaffected in our street, but locally, places that have never known floods at all (and probably never will again for the foreseeable), had problems.
If you're prepared to accept that once in 100 years, you might get flooded, I wouldn't let it worry you too much.
I looked at a house in Cheltenham that again didn't flood but the other houses in the road did.
The only problem was when I looked at house insurance as they were about 4 times more than normal. In the end I decided that as I work 30 miles away I wasn't happy that I could just pop home and put a few sandbags out if needed so I did not purchase in the end.
At the end of the day if you're happy and are prepared to risk it or have a contingency if the waters rise then it must be your decision.
The only problem was when I looked at house insurance as they were about 4 times more than normal. In the end I decided that as I work 30 miles away I wasn't happy that I could just pop home and put a few sandbags out if needed so I did not purchase in the end.
At the end of the day if you're happy and are prepared to risk it or have a contingency if the waters rise then it must be your decision.
skilly1 said:
Engineer1 said:
The other thing to check is the flood maps which are on the environment agency site.
They pretty useless to be honest, not enough detail.RedLeicester said:
skilly1 said:
Engineer1 said:
The other thing to check is the flood maps which are on the environment agency site.
They pretty useless to be honest, not enough detail.Locals around here, talking of the floods of 2007, will remember Prestbury in Cheltenham, which is a village about half way down Cleeve Hill. It's certainly not in a 'dip', but the volume of water coming off the hill flooded almost the whole village on its way through to lower ground.
When I saw Prestbury was flooded on the news, my first thought was also 'how?', but having seen the pictures, it's not as you would expect it to have happened. It basically turned a road on a hill in to a river.
The Environment Agency are pretty switched on people, if they say there's a risk of flooding, it's not without some pretty serious calculations.
maser_spyder said:
The Environment Agency are pretty switched on people, if they say there's a risk of flooding, it's not without some pretty serious calculations.
I have to deal with them on a regular basis, and had an awful lot of work to do with and against them last year - it was made painfully clear by both the surveyors and people at the EA that the flood maps were done from London with no supervision of the actual lie of the land, nor the hydraulic radii / potential overspill volume of any water courses, simply a man with a blue pen.I totally agree there are sections which will suffer from excess run-off, which cannot be easily accounted for, but a tiny stream bed in a 30m deep valley cannot suddenly rise up and flood to the degree which their maps suggest it can (in our particular instance) - in fact in the '07 floods, this area was completely clear, with the relevant ditches, culverts and existing watercourses expanding yet staying within their own banks or depressions, without threatening a single dwelling or farm building.
The EA's reaction to our insurers and surveyors? "Oh, well we don't look at contours on the map". Right. The map are a guideline, nothing more and I loathe the fact they are taken as gospel as they simply aren't - they're just as likely to be inaccurate either way, so someone can just as easily fall afoul of looking at them, thinking themselves in the clear and then coming unstuck when it all gets a bit soggy. It became all the more ludicrous when the EA sent out their latest missive to landowners about planning for the "thousand year flood event" or "hundred year flood event , IE what happened in 07...(depends on where you read as to whether they believe it was the 100 or 1k), demanding we do X, Y, and Z to prepare for it, despite the full surveys of the area showing no flooding or damage from 07, and moreover the British Geological Survey stating there was no geological evidence for any flood events in the last 1000 years, yet still they insist the area would flood.... madness.
So IMHO, take the flood maps as a guideline, but do your own due diligence on it either way.
maser_spyder said:
The Environment Agency are pretty switched on people, if they say there's a risk of flooding, it's not without some pretty serious calculations.
Several years ago I was woken about 6am by an automatic call from the Environment Agency warning me of an imminent flood danger. Fair enough I'm only about 150m away from a reasonably major river, and I have a decent view of it too as my altitude according to GPS is about 90m. I called them and politely pointed this out to be removed from the warning list, in this case their "pretty serious calculations" were hopelessly incorrect.
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